Anyone who works with Canadian government publications knows a standard approach to the publishing of provincial and territorial information simply doesn’t exist. Those not familiar with this landscape likely experience frustration, bafflement, or worse!
How might Internet Archive Canada, in collaboration with the library and archives community, support open and long-term access to Canadian government information? We are working towards understanding the key challenges as we draft a blueprint of what Democracy’s Library Canada might look like.
What is Democracy’s Library?
The Internet Archive and Internet Archive Canada’s Democracy’s Library initiative aims to collect, preserve and make freely available the published works of governments. At the October 2022 launch they announced “over the next decade, the Internet Archive is committing to work with libraries, universities, and agencies everywhere to bring the government’s historical information online.”
An environmental scan is underway
We need to gain a better picture of the overall landscape as it stands. An inventory of what’s already out there will help to identify the gaps in publicly accessible collections. We know the scope is wide and varied, encompassing the federal government, 13 provinces and territories, over 200 municipalities and an as yet undefined number of Indigenous jurisdictions.
Over 320 online collections have been documented to date, starting with Canadian federal, provincial, and territorial government digital publications.
Of the 13 Canadian provinces and territories, only four jurisdictions have a legislated mandate to collect comprehensively (Quebec, Manitoba, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island); two have full depository libraries (Newfoundland & Labrador and Saskatchewan) and the remaining seven rely on a combination of their legislative libraries, government web sites and university library collections.
Municipal and Indigenous publishing has been limited to looking at a representative sample; both have been set aside for proper consultations and focused attention at a later time. Grey literature from think tanks, NGOs and other special interest groups with a focus on public policy will also come under consideration in the coming months.
The environmental scan found that a lot of time and effort has gone into building the existing repositories over the past decade. Some are rigorously maintained, others are now stale-dated, and it is clear that web archiving is of increasing importance.
An active Canadian GovDocs community responded to our survey
Responses to our 2023 survey told us a single point of access to bring together search, discovery and retrieval would be of great value. Too many silos currently exist, making searching onerous.
Inconsistent and incomplete metadata is hindering discoverability. Internet Archive Canada is investigating how AI could assist with metadata creation.
The survey also highlighted concerns over digital publications that are superseded, often disappearing when government websites are updated. Digitization of print holdings, especially pre-1960, are also of interest.
Wouldn’t it be great if we could search across all these collections, plus provide a mechanism for ingesting new digital contributions? We are working on it!
Blog post by Simone O’Byrne